Everyone's bitching about "stealing energy". But this is England. Gloucester, England, a fairly provincial sort of place (incidentally, my American readers, it's pronounced 'Gloster') - I actually know this supermarket. After a few weeks, the mechanism will break down. I might get repaired once or twice, but it will break down again. The management will stick a sign on it saying "out of order". Then after a while that'll be removed and the plate will be permanently fixed in position or removed and tarmaced over. Don't worry about stealing energy, this is how all low-cost, locally engineered, locally paid for schemes on this scale pan out in the UK.
The best one from the Mac was putting the power button right next to the floppy drive
Yeah, nice story. Pity it's not true. The Mac had a rocker switch for power on the back of the machine, next to the power connector. There were no switches of any sort on the front. Much later models may have had a front power switch (Quadra-era maybe, I forget), but by then most Mac users wouldn't be likely to make the mistake of assuming it was a floppy eject button, because such a thing had never existed on any Mac. Much, much much later, keyboards started to include a general virtual eject button.
Because they were on manual backup control they could not exert enough force on the controls to recover
The A330 is entirely fly-by-wire. Force on the controls doesn't come into it. Also, in the light of reports that an automatic message reporting an electrical systems failure was received, it seems likely that *something* caused a major power failure at which point the aircraft was simply out of control.
How do you know it's costless? Only the OP knows that - clearly the fact he has misgivings indicates that he does not consider this costless. My wife and I don't even allow each other access to our respective laptops in normal use, and I wouldn't say we weren't really "friends".
Be firm. Saying no needn't be rude and unfriendly. Your friends will know where you stand, and stop asking. You don't have to tell them to "fuck off", just explain in a friendly manner. If you're afraid your friends will desert you or stop liking you because you won't give them access to your laptop, I'd suggest you have other issues. Also, if they did that, they couldn't really have been friends.
And a particularly dire one at that. If you haven't seen it, don't bother - it's all but unwatchable and makes very little sense. Bond can be good escapist fantasy, but this effort was well below par.
According to Wikipedia it was just a random name that wasn't encumbered. However, it also happens to be a spoonerism for "Big Zee" which is one nickname for Zaphod Beeblebrox in the Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy. Coincidence?
The PowerPC should really be there. Not so much for its use in the Mac, but because it's so widespread in the embedded world. In fact, I think it's the most used embedded architecture by far. You might not think of your car or washing machine as "world-changing", at least not for their electronics, but actually the reliability of modern devices is largely down to this. The PPC must be one of the most common "invisible" bits of technology that most people actually use.
Nah. The 386 was only Intel getting its act together - finally - after the debacle of its earlier efforts and finally waking up to the far cleaner design that was the 68000 family. The 68000 was truly a "mainframe on a chip", it was designed precisely to look like the architecture of a PDP-11, and its design began in 1976. Intel took nearly twenty years to catch up.
Atari, Mac, Amiga? They all used the 68000 family, because you could write a GUI-based OS to run on it. By contrast, the Intel chip held back that approach on the IBM-PC platform, just look at the travesty that was Windows 1.0 and 2.0 compared with its 68000-based contemporaries. It did take the 386 to change that for the PC platform, but only because Intel copied the 68000. That then allowed Windows 95 to run reasonably well and the rest is history.
If IBM had chosen the 68000 for its PC project, things may have turned out very, very differently.
OK, not a chip but a chip family - but surely one that, perhaps even more than the 7400 series, influenced an entire generation of engineers and circuit designs. It really was the first major series that allowed you to pretty much bolt together designs, lego-fashion, from building blocks without really worrying about interfacing too much. In comparison the 7400 series was much fussier with limited fanout and fan-in, and a fixed 5v supply. CMOS was BASIC to the 7400's COBOL.
Yeah, me too. But actually, there was an advantage to the fragility of the whole darn mess - it made me very, very defensive as a programmer. Because I couldn't stand the reboots and the hard-to-debug memory errors, I would go out of my way to avoid them at all costs. I think in many ways it made me a better programmer than I would be starting out today.
It's a big problem: build something pretty, and it becomes an object of desire, even to have a small part, and people will take. Build something that will last a long time, and it needs to be resistant to weathering, and therefore valuable, and people will take. Build something that has a function, it will be a source of political power to control it, and people who do not control it will try to destroy it. The engineering is only one part of the problem
Solution: make it nuclear-powered, and not make any provision for shielding the radiation. That ought to keep people away! The time can be safely read using a telescope.
Then the idiot delivery woman keeps throwing papers in the middle of the street, where they get squashed by passing cars (or disappear completely). I've complained but the news executives have done naught to fix the problem
Maybe you should just complain to the newsagent that employs her instead? Sometimes going all the way to the top isn't as effective...
Slashdot Mirror
The damn bears are smarter than you'd think
Smarter than the average bear. Booboo.
I think I need to start writing my own OS...
... the Observer...
The Observer isn't a Murdoch paper - it's owned by The Guardian, and one of the few independents left. Cherish it.
This seems likely to lend new fervor to the "Mac SE 30 was the best Mac ever" argument, one that I've been tired of every since...well...colour.
The SE/30 had colour - you just needed an extra video card and external monitor to see it. That's how I used mine...
What did you expect to happen to your money given to a man named Madoff. I assume it's pronounced with a long 'a'...
t's a stupid system which is held onto simply because it's what we're used to
For a second there I thought I'd strayed into another thread about Windows...
Everyone's bitching about "stealing energy". But this is England. Gloucester, England, a fairly provincial sort of place (incidentally, my American readers, it's pronounced 'Gloster') - I actually know this supermarket. After a few weeks, the mechanism will break down. I might get repaired once or twice, but it will break down again. The management will stick a sign on it saying "out of order". Then after a while that'll be removed and the plate will be permanently fixed in position or removed and tarmaced over. Don't worry about stealing energy, this is how all low-cost, locally engineered, locally paid for schemes on this scale pan out in the UK.
The best one from the Mac was putting the power button right next to the floppy drive
Yeah, nice story. Pity it's not true. The Mac had a rocker switch for power on the back of the machine, next to the power connector. There were no switches of any sort on the front. Much later models may have had a front power switch (Quadra-era maybe, I forget), but by then most Mac users wouldn't be likely to make the mistake of assuming it was a floppy eject button, because such a thing had never existed on any Mac. Much, much much later, keyboards started to include a general virtual eject button.
It has to span multiple points along the time axis to be dimensional in that regard
And how do you know it doesn't? Prove it.
Only idiotic, big organizations like Boeing use Wind River stuff
Just FYI, my PVR runs on VxWorks. It's made by a small Korean company called Topfield.
Because they were on manual backup control they could not exert enough force on the controls to recover
The A330 is entirely fly-by-wire. Force on the controls doesn't come into it. Also, in the light of reports that an automatic message reporting an electrical systems failure was received, it seems likely that *something* caused a major power failure at which point the aircraft was simply out of control.
How do you know it's costless? Only the OP knows that - clearly the fact he has misgivings indicates that he does not consider this costless. My wife and I don't even allow each other access to our respective laptops in normal use, and I wouldn't say we weren't really "friends".
Be firm. Saying no needn't be rude and unfriendly. Your friends will know where you stand, and stop asking. You don't have to tell them to "fuck off", just explain in a friendly manner. If you're afraid your friends will desert you or stop liking you because you won't give them access to your laptop, I'd suggest you have other issues. Also, if they did that, they couldn't really have been friends.
Seems like every single product these times has to have "HD" at the end
Yay! It can finally allow me to read all those 1.4MB floppies I have in a box in a cupboard somewhere...
yet another rehash of the old Bond series
And a particularly dire one at that. If you haven't seen it, don't bother - it's all but unwatchable and makes very little sense. Bond can be good escapist fantasy, but this effort was well below par.
Who doesn't see anything good having come from Sony
Oh I dunno - I bought a Sony Cassette Deck in 1988 and it's still working alright. Does that count?
According to Wikipedia it was just a random name that wasn't encumbered. However, it also happens to be a spoonerism for "Big Zee" which is one nickname for Zaphod Beeblebrox in the Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy. Coincidence?
The PowerPC should really be there. Not so much for its use in the Mac, but because it's so widespread in the embedded world. In fact, I think it's the most used embedded architecture by far. You might not think of your car or washing machine as "world-changing", at least not for their electronics, but actually the reliability of modern devices is largely down to this. The PPC must be one of the most common "invisible" bits of technology that most people actually use.
Nah. The 386 was only Intel getting its act together - finally - after the debacle of its earlier efforts and finally waking up to the far cleaner design that was the 68000 family. The 68000 was truly a "mainframe on a chip", it was designed precisely to look like the architecture of a PDP-11, and its design began in 1976. Intel took nearly twenty years to catch up.
Atari, Mac, Amiga? They all used the 68000 family, because you could write a GUI-based OS to run on it. By contrast, the Intel chip held back that approach on the IBM-PC platform, just look at the travesty that was Windows 1.0 and 2.0 compared with its 68000-based contemporaries. It did take the 386 to change that for the PC platform, but only because Intel copied the 68000. That then allowed Windows 95 to run reasonably well and the rest is history.
If IBM had chosen the 68000 for its PC project, things may have turned out very, very differently.
OK, not a chip but a chip family - but surely one that, perhaps even more than the 7400 series, influenced an entire generation of engineers and circuit designs. It really was the first major series that allowed you to pretty much bolt together designs, lego-fashion, from building blocks without really worrying about interfacing too much. In comparison the 7400 series was much fussier with limited fanout and fan-in, and a fixed 5v supply. CMOS was BASIC to the 7400's COBOL.
I did a ton of work in THINK C 5 on Mac OS 7
Yeah, me too. But actually, there was an advantage to the fragility of the whole darn mess - it made me very, very defensive as a programmer. Because I couldn't stand the reboots and the hard-to-debug memory errors, I would go out of my way to avoid them at all costs. I think in many ways it made me a better programmer than I would be starting out today.
It's a big problem: build something pretty, and it becomes an object of desire, even to have a small part, and people will take. Build something that will last a long time, and it needs to be resistant to weathering, and therefore valuable, and people will take. Build something that has a function, it will be a source of political power to control it, and people who do not control it will try to destroy it. The engineering is only one part of the problem
Solution: make it nuclear-powered, and not make any provision for shielding the radiation. That ought to keep people away! The time can be safely read using a telescope.
Then the idiot delivery woman keeps throwing papers in the middle of the street, where they get squashed by passing cars (or disappear completely). I've complained but the news executives have done naught to fix the problem
Maybe you should just complain to the newsagent that employs her instead? Sometimes going all the way to the top isn't as effective...
toutes vos base sont appartiennent à nous
I might be missing something, but I'm not quite sure why you're being modded 'Troll' here, isn't this simply valid and on topic information?
Well, I thought so... but since when have mods ever taken that into account if they didn't agree with something?